“The first time, my mother brought me here in a stroller,” council-member Joe Buscaino recalls during the Saint Joseph’s celebration in San Pedro, a feast that has had a profound meaning for his family for a long time. His grandmother, Rosaria LoGrande, known as nonna Savina, was one of the six Sicilian women members of the Italian Catholic Federation that, back in 1973 decided to put on a feast like  those you find in Sicily.

“At the time, the wife of the president of the Catholic Italian Federation was ill and he wanted to do something to help her,” Rosalia Orlando tells me. “ ‘Could you guys put on a feast as they do in Sicily?’ he asked these women.  One of them was my mother, Paolina Manzella from Trappeto, Palermo.”